Wednesday, November 12, 2014

Will Future Generations Prosecute Old Climate Change Deniers?

I can imagine a future say 2070 where some efforts were made to stop climate change but it was not enough. But the carbon industry was so strong with its large amounts of money. Because more money could be made using fossil fuels not enough effort was put in reducing carbon dioxide emission. Lots of renewable energy was put into the grid. There were large solar and wind farms. The mid west and Texas had many wind generators and California led the nation with electricity generated by solar power. Many people around the world had solar panels on their roofs to help in the generation of electricity. But carbon dioxide emission was still too much and most of what the climate models predicted occurred. The earth's temperature continues to rise. The ice in the Arctic and Antarctic have dramatically melted as models predicted, thus a global rise in sea levels. Lower areas along the coasts have serious flooding problems and many areas had to be abandoned. Weather patterns have changed also. In North America Canada's prairies are now doing what the mid west of the US used to do. Similar efforts have been happening around the world. Some regions are now uninhabitable and this forced the mass exodus of millions of people. Water and food shortages have occurred in many parts of the world causing large regional wars. The migration caused tens of millions of deaths with possibly billions on the brink of death. Deadly diseases such as cholera have spread All of this could have been stopped 50 or 60 years ago but greed caused a failure to help save the lives of possibly billions of people. This didn't need to have happened if only policy makers world wide would have listened to the scientists back then. But climate change deniers were a powerful force and policy makers followed them instead of the science. Thus the planet was changing in a direction that would dramatically change the future of mankind.